


We Met At A Party

by lilithtorch2



Series: Gossiping and Bickering [9]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel, Marvel (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers - Ambiguous Fandom
Genre: AU where everyone lives and no one dies and everyone is happy even The Red Room, An AU Where the Ex-Wife Actually Works, F/M, Gen, Part of the Gossiping and Bickering Series AU, Someone miraculously gets their memories back, Spoilers, Spoilers in Notes section
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-14
Updated: 2014-03-14
Packaged: 2018-01-11 12:59:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,753
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1173362
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilithtorch2/pseuds/lilithtorch2
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>REWRITTEN</p><p>Interviewer: "How did you and Bucky Barnes find each other again?"</p><p>Natasha Romanoff: “Mutual friends introduced us at a party.” She did not mention that she and the Avengers, including Steve Rogers, had accidentally encountered Bucky Barnes (as the Winter Soldier), and their mutual friends, Ana and Erik, on a mission in France.</p>
            </blockquote>





	We Met At A Party

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [This Too Shall Pass](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1146462) by [lilithtorch2](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilithtorch2/pseuds/lilithtorch2). 



> This also got out of hand. Inspired by Chapter 6 of "This Too Shall Pass"
> 
> OK, it looks like the BuckyNat relationship will only be acknowledged, but god damn! You create this gigantic coincidence in the comics where both Steve, Natasha, and Bucky have this shared connection that if the MCU were real life, TMZ would have been all over that...I would be disappointed if that gets retconned, unexplored, or unacknowledged. That stuff is the stuff of tabloid fodder!
> 
> Anyway, this is the crack-ish version of the Bucky-Nat-Steve connection.

_Okay. Then how did you find each other again?_

 

“Mutual friends introduced us at a party.” Natasha said. She did not mention that she and the Avengers, including Steve, had accidentally encountered Bucky (as the Winter Soldier), and their mutual friends, Ana and Erik, on a mission in France.

* * *

This should have been an easy mission. A few of the Avengers were assigned by Fury to thwart an illegal arms operation taking place in France. Get in, get out, debrief, report back to Fury, done. And she'd be able to go and visit Asgard with Jane Foster and Darcy Lewis so that she could see Fandral again. There should have been no problems. _At all._ But Steve had sensed someone coming their way and tackled him down. Natasha saw a woman running to the man’s aide and held her at gunpoint, yelling at her not to move.

But the woman called out one of her names, one that Natasha had not heard in a very long time.

“Natalia?!”

“Natalia?” The man pinned down by Steve called out in Russian. “Ana, she’s been dead for years.”

“I’m telling you, that’s _her_! Look!”

 _Ana…_ that was the name of her sister from another mother from her days in Russia. The woman certainly looked like her, only slightly older. But if that were true, then the guy on the ground was Ana’s boyfriend, Erik and that meant that someone else was with them.

The Winter Soldier.

He still has long hair, Natasha noted with some exasperation. Same blue eyes, same cockiness (albeit toned down now), same metal arm with the red star. She heard another voice ask her why she was hesitating.

“Stark, wait!”

It was too late; a very tiny missile of Stark's (also known as The Ex-Wife) was already flying toward the Winter Soldier, but he quickly dodged it. The missile hit the wall a distance behind him, exploding on impact. She heard another sound-

“Clint, dammit, don’t shoot! _Don’t shoot!_ ”

Thankfully, the Winter Soldier caught the arrow. Well, of course he did. He wasn’t the deadly Winter Soldier for nothing.

Steve looked up at her. “What are you doing, Nat? Coulson’s not going to like this…” But his line of sight turned to the Winter Soldier. “Wait a minute… _Bucky?_ Is that you? I thought you were dead! I watched you fall!”

Now it was the Winter Soldier’s turn to be confused. He seemed to struggle with the name ‘Bucky’ before he finally spoke in a Brooklyn accent that he had never used around her before:

“Holy crap, Steve?! How are you still the same age?!” He blinked. “How are you still alive?! The last time I saw you was…”

“How do _you_ know the Winter Soldier, Steve?” Natasha asked. She still had her gun pointed at the woman called Ana. There was no way a huge coincidence like this could happen. Whoever these three were, they had to be imposters…right?

“I grew up with him,” Steve explained. “How is he the Winter Soldier? He’s my _brother._ ”

“You _can’t_ be serious.” That was Bucky? The one Steve always talked about with great respect and admiration? To Natasha, he was just an arrogant jerk who she tolerated. Maybe the Winter Soldier looked like the boy from Steve's old pictures, but she couldn't believe it.

Or could she?

The Winter Soldier and this Bucky Barnes both had dark hair (Bucky’s was shorter) and blue eyes, and they both loved women. But the Winter Soldier was also an efficient killer. How could someone as nice as Steve know someone as brazen as the Winter Soldier?

“I _am_ serious, Nat. That’s Bucky Barnes. That’s my brother.”

No one moved while they tried to mentally bridge the connections between Natasha, the Winter Soldier, and Steve.

“May I get up now?” Erik asked innocently in English.

“No!” Steve and Natasha cried out. Natasha could see that the Winter Soldier with the long hair was already mentally planning out an escape. Erik and Ana were both glancing in his direction for orders. She needed to figure this out before they were unnecessarily dragged into a fight.

Natasha nodded toward the Winter Soldier. “ _He’s_ the one who you said was, and I quote, ‘ten times better than Tony’?”

“Well, Bucky is _my name_ , too, apparently,” the Winter Soldier hissed at Natasha in Russian, “but I should be asking you what _yours_ is!”

Tony protested. “What? Steve, he is not ‘ten times better’ than me! When did you say that?”

“Someone care to explain why you are all hesitating?” Coulson chimed in to the Avengers’ CommLink. He and Aamir from I.T. were still back in The Bus. “All I see from my feed are people standing around and talking. We’re on a time crunch here.”

“Nat, I’m on top of a building, are we fucked now or what?” Clint’s voice through the commlink now.

“No, Clint, I’m trying to figure this out!”

“Everyone, _stop_.” Aamir’s voice now. “Put me on speaker. We’ll figure this out. What do you need, Natasha?”

Everyone stopped talking while Natasha asked Aamir to get the Avengers analytics on the Russians. She refused to believe that the three people standing before her were her friends and classmates from a distant past. That wasn’t possible. “I need to know who they really are.”

“Fine.”

“But who are _you_?” The Winter Soldier asked Natasha in Russian.

She ignored him when Aamir confirmed that the man with the long dark hair was indeed the Winter Soldier.

“There’s something else…”

“What?” Tony asked.

“They’re telling me he’s also Bucky Barnes.”

Tony laughed. "Wow, this is priceless. Steve, you're not the only old geezer around here after all."

Coulson inhaled sharply; that little piece of news about Bucky was definitely a shocker for the Captain America fan. “And Bucky,” Coulson added, “was a Howling Commando, right, Steve?”

"Yes."

Aamir drifted off into research mode, figuring out how Bucky became the Winter Soldier. He muttered to himself. “I wonder how that happened…Oh. _Oh…_ Ooof, okay…that’s… complicated… I’m drawing a timeline. Coulson, sir, help me out here, you know everything about Cap… Natasha, give me one minute…”

“Sweetheart, you _still_ haven’t given me your name,” the Winter Soldier repeated his question to Natasha.

That was something the Winter Soldier liked to call her when they were younger, but she just wanted to know who the other two Russians were. “What about the other two?”

“I’m still trying to draw a timeline! Some of this stuff doesn’t make sense to me, unless…” Aamir cried, but he told her anyway. The two Russians were Ana Sadovsky and Erik Abramovich.

There was only one thing left for Natasha to do. She turned to Ana and asked her a series of questions that only she would know. The more Ana answered her questions, the more Natasha began to believe this huge twist of fate was actually happening to her. Natasha asked Ana if she still had the picture, and Ana nodded mischievously. “Always keep it with me in case of emergencies.” She quickly showed Natasha a picture of the Winter Soldier in a ridiculous getup that the girls had forced him to wear when he lost a bet.

To the surprise of the Avengers present, Natasha giggled and hugged Ana.

Steve sensed that the danger was averted and let go of Erik, who joined Ana and Natasha in a group hug. “We missed you! We really thought you were dead! How?”

Natasha only mentioned that Clint spared her life before she furtively glanced at the Winter Soldier, who remained suspicious of her intentions. He seemed to relax a little when he realized Ana and Erik would be unharmed. Ana, catching Natasha in the act, whispered, “Look, he misses you too, be nicer to him, okay?”

Natasha only walked closer to the Winter Soldier (“are you sure that’s safe?” “It’ll be fine, Clint”) and stood close enough to him to kiss. She stared at his deep blue eyes and wondered what it was she was feeling. She was relieved to know that he was still alive, but did this mean there was something else? She wanted to hug him, or cry, or something. Instead, well...

_SLAP._

“I thought for _sure_ that your inflated ego would have gotten you killed!”

The Winter Soldier was taken aback, but immediately recovered and yelled back at her. “Well, thank the stars it didn’t! I bet that makes you really mad, doesn’t it?!”

“Wouldn’t _you_ like that?”

“I _would_! How are you still the same old irritating Natalia?! After what…decades now?”

“Are you calling me old?”

“What?”

“Do that again. I dare you. _I. Dare. You._ ”

He did. She punched; he countered.

“Still not as good as me,” Bucky sneered, “I would have thought you had all this time to practice. Unless you've gone _soft?”_

"I _don't_ go soft!"

The rest of the Avengers were not sure what to do with this new side to Natasha. Normally, she was calm and collected, but around Bucky Barnes the Winter Soldier, she had become a completely different person. It seemed like Bucky and Natasha might be enjoying themselves, but no one wanted to ask. As for Steve, he inadvertently stepped into the role of Bucky and Natasha’s baby-sitter, a role that Erik had previously held.

He interrupted their argument, giving everyone’s ears a break. “Bucky?”

Natasha immediately pursed her lips.

“Yes, Steve?” Bucky said, cooling off a little.

“How do you know Natasha?”

Bucky looked at him, eyes wide. “Natasha? That’s Natalia. She was training with me in Russia…”

Before Bucky could explain further, Natasha grabbed him by the collar. The rest of the Avengers watched again as Natasha waved her arms at angrily stabbed the Winter Soldier with her finger. In return, the Winter Soldier hovered over her with a series of furious objections. Tony thought he could hear them admit quietly that they were glad the other person was still alive, but they quickly resumed their arguing, from his hair to her choice in teammates (“Except Steve; he’s fine.” “Agreed.”).

Tony turned to the two Russians, who were only sitting back and letting the fight unfold.

“Did this happen a lot back in…?”

“You have no idea.” Ana shrugged, laughing. “Good luck! You’re going to need it!”

The Avengers would not know how much luck they would need until the numerous occasions where they had to complete Bucky and Natasha’s missions for them because they couldn’t fight without attracting attention.


End file.
